We are Living in a Neurotypical World, and I am a Neuro...divergent... Girl?

For an autism outreach seminar that I was lucky enough to be invited onto as a guest speaker, on 24 March, the very first question I am to be posed is: what is it like living in a neurotypical world?

What an extraordinarily jarring and deep question. What a thing to be asked as an opener. 

For neurotypical readers, consider this as a similarly daunting question: if you were indefinitely trapped in a fairground, what would you do? Would you go on the rides, over and over and over again, praying that the fun and the repetition would translate into a meaningful routine that helps lift the haze that clouds your strangely newfound and puzzling existence? Would you take stock of your surroundings, mapping the fair so you know where to go, who you encounter, what to do, how to do it, and when? Would you willingly enter the House of Horrors, dragging the weight you feel in your stomach around until your insides feel the muscle memory to ignore the adrenaline shots every time the room feels too dark?

I think being autistic in a world that is fundamentally not is to ask similar, quite profound, questions. Do I seek comfort, or safety, or resistance through exposure?

My experience as an autistic person is very much an atypical one. I'm not going to profess to be above-average intelligence but I have been able to pursue an embryonic academic career with all the independence I felt I could deploy. I have lived a relatively independent life, with little to no comorbidities that really hindered my ability to adapt to mildly stressful and traumatic situations. I have experienced probably more loss and death than the average person my age, but I have navigated grief and recovery the best I can given what was hiding within the entire time.

So I want to do a little bit more with this question that I originally intended. I want to refract it to show all of its colours. I originally intended to convey the difficulties and hardships of living in a world that is structurally designed, through capitalism, the media, advertising, and other systems of power, for neurotypicals to flourish. Capitalism rewards gregariousness and opportunistic behaviour; marketing and advertisement requires an, albeit creative, eye for repetition and an appeal to humanity's baser urges. But I want to use this question as an opportunity to reflect on my own privilege.

I’m not middle-class, but I am a white male and that affords me credit in social situations I otherwise might not. If I am ever unintentionally curt, or don’t understand social or information cues, people tend to automatically assume I have a developmental problem rather than attributing it to cultural ignorance or an inherent racial trait. I imagine that the removal of that white privilege would make my time in a neurotypical world a lot more challenging. Neurotypical black men are shot in the United States, and beaten by the police in the United Kingdom, for demonstrating basic levels of empathy and humanity in the face of overwhelming and overt demonstrations of state power. I can't ever say I've been physically assaulted by the police, but there faces a black Jamaican autistic man who faces deportation for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I'm not sure what I can add to embellish the enormous sense of injustice you may feel reading that. 

My own professional world also tends to make significant accommodations towards my condition, too. I am given access to large, open spaces that naturally filters noise really well – the Righton Building in MMU is extremely autism-friendly, combining an open-plan common room-type space with a classroom. It is also full of plants, short and tall, with neutral smells that make me feel physically and mentally comfortable. Whether by design or simply by consequence, everyone in this open space is placid and friendly. You get the sense its all for you.

My supervisor is also brilliant; he’s extremely personable (not an egregious and unbearable Toff) and doesn’t email every other day querying ideas and chasing paperwork. He trusts me in the working environment and that is something I would wager not a lot of autistic people experience. 

In one job I had, a man with developmental problems was barely trusted to do the one job he was hired to do. It is demeaning, but its more demoralising. The relentlessness of the general working environment means people are treated as mere means; mere means, that is, to the ends, which is a huge stack of cash.

My part time job at an Adidas factory outlet is where I run into the more challenging aspects of the neurotypical world. ‘Using intuition’ is something I can be either really good at or struggle with, and when confronted with difficult customers or a wayward pair of pants that don’t match what’s on the rack, the difficulties rise to the surface. Like mouldy cream. Customers that show aggression, to me (and I know I can’t speak for all autistic retail workers), are much easier to deal with that customers that show a level of passive-aggression and threat veiled thinly with politeness. There’s too many layers of information to decode in a sudden and unexpected encounter like that. One of the three or four times I’ve melted down in a public-facing job is when someone started acting strangely, rather than aggressively, about the labels not matching the correct tomatoes.

As you probably expected, the social side of things is the hardest. I feel this sense of overbearing and fairly abstract pressure wherever I go socially, be it to a bar in the middle of Manchester or running through the park in Offerton. I was once outside a bar in Manchester and I saw a bloke vomitting as he was striding drunkenly back inside towards the bar. His projectile vomit landed infront of him each time his stomach conracted, laying the track for him, pre-empting his steps. It was, of course, very funny. But it was one of those moments where the sheer strangeness of existence became suddenly apparant. The absolute absurdity of what had just happened - life, and society, and meaning all bound up into one experience that I had so happened to share with this man. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called this "Nausea"; the sudden, overwhelming dissonance that one may experience. I'm not sure if anybody else still feels the Nausea from that, rippling through time. I definitely do.

I feel pressure to have a good time, more than anything, and the neurotypical world has become enamoured recently with marketing and wellness campaigns that frame safe spaces and comfort zones as something to be overcome. That feels personally quite damaging but I can imagine it would feel empowering to others, especially those in my age category that, in moving to a big university city, for the first time are required to demonstrate levels of independence they haven’t before.

Marketing and advertising also rubs me up the wrong way. They appeal to the worst of people’s desires and baser needs and the medium itself is often overstimulating, gaudy, bright and loud (visually as well as aurally).

To end simply, metaphorically; the world of neurotypicals is loud, and autistics need the quiet. I am lucky enough to have better earmuffs than most.